New Literature: The Steep Approach to Garbadale

Almost five years since his last literary novel, Iain Banks returns with his most absorbing story since The Crow Road. The Steep Approach to Garbadale is classic Banks, reinforcing his credentials as one of the most able, energetic and stimulating writers of our generation. His prolific career has been both populist and experimental.

Iain Banks came to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984. When it was picked out of the ‘slush pile’ on his 30th Birthday – over 10 years after he had started writing it. Banks has since gained enormous popular and critical acclaim. He is almost unique in that he has achieved success in two genres, mainstream literary fiction and the science fiction books written under the name Iain M. Banks.

The Steep Approach to Garbadale is a family saga, which achieves both menace and humour. Compromised loyalties, personal agendas and incestuous secrets plague the Wopuld family. A family whose fortune was built by a board game called Empire!, a wildly successful computer game. So successful in fact that the American Sprait Corp are trying to buy the Wopuld’s out. The divided family try to come to a decision about the offer, before the extraordinary matriarch’s 80th birthday party at their highland castle, Garbadale. Garbadale is steeped in memory and history, particularly for renegade Alban; this is where his mother unexpectedly died. Alban must go back to Garbadale despite these tortuous memories. He must go back and face his first love.

Iain Banks' novels have attracted the attention of filmmakers and broadcasters. The BBC successfully adapted his 1992 novel, The Crow Road, into a four-part television series and Espedair Street (1987) was produced as a BBC Radio 4 Series, for which Banks wrote the accompanying music and lyrics.

In 1993 he was acknowledged as one of the Best of Young British Writers. In 1996 his number one bestseller, The Crow Road, was adapted for television. His most recent literary fiction novel, Dead Air, was published in 2002, with his latest science fiction novel, The Algebraist, followed in 2004. He lives in Fife, Scotland.

Published in Little, Brown hardback on 1st March 2007, priced £17.99